I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to methods and systems relating to data processing and Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) of Computer Systems; including those for common personal computers, laptop computers, personal data assistants, advanced wireless communications devices having embedded computational applications, “thin” client front-end systems (relying on server bases CPU engines), distributed computing systems, and the likes. More particularly, the invention relates to (multimedia) content sharing, widgets, web services, online communications and interactions.
II. Background Information
In today's Internet, users can easily share contents with one another through content sharing services. For example, photo gallery services such as PhotoBucket and Flickr® provide users with the ability to create albums with various effects to be shared with friends. Video sharing services such as YouTube allows users to post clips and even create channels containing multiple clips that can be subscribed to by followers. There are many other services that allow users to create different types of personalized content that may be shared with others on the Internet, e.g. Amazon's Wish-List or Last.fm's music play-list. Long presented on conventional web pages, often, the content that enables these services may also be made available in the form of widgets. Widgets are mini-applications having a compact visual representation that can be embedded in another application and can be distributed virally across the Internet. Prior art US20060015818A1 defines a widget framework called “dashboard” that facilitates widget management and interaction on a desktop environment. The defining characteristic of a widget is to provide a single interaction point for the direct manipulation of a given kind of data. Widgets are basic visual building blocks which, combined in an application, hold all the data processed by the application and the available interactions on this data.
As more and more types of personalized Web content emerged, online aggregation sites emerged. There are two main categories of aggregation sites, those that are social-network oriented and those that are start-page oriented. Examples of social-network oriented aggregation sites are Facebook and MySpace. Both Facebook and MySpace allow different types of personalized contents or widgets to be added to the user's profile, and enable friends and followers within a social-network to track each other's latest statuses and activities. It is typical to see very long profile pages containing many widgets on a personalized social-network oriented aggregation site. Viewers of such sites are often overwhelmed by the amount of information presented on site pages. Examples of start-page oriented sites are iGoogle, Netvibes, and Pageflakes. These sites aggregate different types of personalized contents and services together by encapsulating the contents and services as widgets. Users may then select a desired widget of interest to be added to their respective start-pages. Widget-based start-page technologies can be interpreted as online versions of the dashboard framework described in prior art US20060015818A1. As with individual widgets, start-pages themselves may be published and shared among users. Services such as yourminis.com have implemented the necessary infrastructure to support the publishing and sharing of such start-pages.
There is a need for an application that pushes the sharing of start-pages one step further by treating each start-page as a widget/virtual device. In such a system the virtual device shall function as a compact container capable of storing different types of customized or personalized contents or services, including but not limited to news, photos, audios, videos, clips, play-lists, wish-lists, as well as communications and presence-related services. Different from prior art start-page technologies, there is a need for a virtual device designed operatively configured as a widget itself, which may therefore be easily embedded in sites with widget embedment support. There is a need for a virtual device that allows users to enjoy the benefit of both viral distribution and embedment, similar to the many widgets currently distributed across the Internet. Such a virtual device would allow start-page configured content to be readily shared. There is also a need for a virtual device that allows for different layout configurations when the device is embedded in different environments. There is also a need for a virtual device that may be configured to different sizes and may optimize the layout and navigation of widgets contained therein according to a user's specification and the amount of space available on a display for an application to provide output; by doing so, the virtual device can alleviate the problems associated with widget crowdedness found in many of today's social-networking sites without implemented any changes to those sites.
In traditional start-page technologies, users interact directly with individual widgets contained in the start-pages to make changes to their settings and contents, or access the services provided by the widgets. There is a need for an application that provides a set of centralized functions that enables the widgets contained within the application to provide the underlying service implementation. There is a need for an application that enables one-click access to the centralized functions, such as for example, content capturing, personal information management and communication. There is also a need for an application that is configured in a manner so as to allow shortcuts for accessing the centralized functions which may optionally be added in 3rd-party applications installed in the same environment, such as voice calling, messaging and presence-related applications that may be integrated with the virtual device in a similar manner.